Circuits, methods, and apparatus that reduce the amount of data
transferred between a graphics processor integrated circuit and graphics
memory. Various embodiments of the present invention further improve the
efficiency of blenders that are included on a graphics processor. One
embodiment provides for the storage of a reduced number of subsamples of
a pixel when the storage of a larger number of subsamples would be
redundant. The number of subsamples that are blended with source data are
compressed, thereby reducing the task load on the blenders increasing
their efficiency. These methods can be disabled to avoid errors that may
arise in certain applications.